Tuesday, 16 September 2014

Torment VI used to be the hardest setting in Diablo
III, a place where only the most hardcore players would go in order to show off
their skills, their characters, their gear and of course, to secure those
all-too-important bragging rights. Well, that’s no longer the case: Torment VI
has been left in the dust difficulty-wise, with the addition of Greater Rifts –
tiered dungeons. With the Greater Rift in the picture, everything above rank 25
is in fact more difficult than Torment VI.

Doing a rank 40 Greater Rift is beyond the
capabilities of most recreational players: the mobs are ultra-strong,
possessing billions of HP and each of them well capable of killing the player
with one blow. There are quite a few of them bustling around too, so one has to
be adept at stunning them in order to avoid instantly falling victim to one of
them. To add to the already formidable difficulty: players are given a mere 15
minutes to do the Greater Rift run. With the odds stacked so ridiculously high
against the player, one would expect that very few could ever successfully
complete such a run. Nothing’s further from the truth though: there are
actually players out there who can complete a rank 40 Greater Rift in under 8
minutes.

On September 7, Alkaizer and Philos, both of them
Diablo III veterans and elite players (Alkaizer was in fact the first to reach
Paragon Level 100 in the game), made it in about 7 minutes and 43seconds.

If you think they used some uber-characters to pull
off the feat, you can think again: they both did it with season 1 characters,
which essentially means that the characters used for the run did not even exist
two weeks ago.

Admittedly, the two did get lucky here and there in
the way of mob density and type and pylons, but their accomplishment is quite
phenomenal nonetheless.

Philip Thalberg works for GosuGamers.net, the internet’s top eSports destination.

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